Werner Glinka is a mixed media artist who lives in Woodside, California. He was born and raised in Gelsenkirchen, Germany an industrial town of coal mines and steel plants. There he was educated as an electrical engineer.

He came to California in 1981 to work in Silicon Valley where he enjoyed a successful career as an engineering and marketing executive. After he moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains, he developed his unique style of assemblage combining the influences of the sleek, steel-and-glass modernism of the Bauhaus movement with the simple, functional grace of Japanese landscapes. He maintains an art studio in Belmont.

Driven by instinct, and informed by a highly developed minimalist aesthetic sense of balance and proportion, Glinka’s work is simplicity itself. But simplicity is never simple. Even his materials carry emotional weight: barbed wire, ash, and pearls. He has always found inspiration at the intersection of man and nature, and the interaction and juxtaposition of the two.

Glinka explains that the triggers for this work are as diverse as the work itself, and range from something as ordinary and invisible as an asphalt-filled crack in the street, to the in-your-face complexity and near-chaos of New York City. Like an antenna picking up the news we deem important about why and how we are here, he processes these signals and sends them back out into the world, fulfilling his artist’s role as a feedback loop in an intelligent system.

Glinka refuses to title these works, lest he add his own layer of interpretation where none is required. “Once it’s on the wall,” he maintains, “my work is done.” In doing so, he honors the vantage point from which each individual sees his work, while simultaneously creating space for each reaction.

Glinka has shown his work throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Peninsula Museum of Art, the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the AVArtfest at the Triton Museum, d.p. Fong Gallery, Crockett Contemporary Art ,the 1870 Art Center, the Oliver Hyde Gallery, 1212 Gallery in Burlingame and the Fingerhut Gallery in Sausalito. His artwork is owned by private collectors in the US, Japan and Europe.

Glinka founded German American Artists with Ines Tancre and Inge Infante in 2005 to promote the art of German immigrant artists. The group maintains their own website - germanamericanartists.com - and organizes "brick-and-mortar" exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Germany.